Passage Illustrated: The Overstuffed "Padre" and the Flamenco Dancer

It would have, indeed, been difficult to trace in that almost insolent air of conscious beauty the calm, subdued, and almost sorrow-struck girl whom we have seen as Nina in a former chapter; but, however dissimilar in appearance, they were the same one individual; and the humble femme de chambre of Kate Dalton was the celebrated ballet-dancer of the great theatre of Barcelona.

The figure which followed was a strange contrast to that light and elegant form. He was an old, short man, of excessive corpulence in body, and whose face was bloated and purple by intemperance. He was dressed in the habit of a priest, and was in reality a Canon of the Dome Cathedral. His unwieldy gait, his short and laboured respiration, increased almost to suffocation by the ascent of the stairs and his cumbrous dress, seemed doubly absurd beside the flippant lightness of the “Ballarina.” Jekyl came last, mimicking the old canon behind his back, and putting the waiter's gravity to a severe test by the bloated expansion of his cheek and the fin-like motion of his hands as he went.

“Ecco me!” cried he out, with a deep grunt, as he sank into a chair and wiped the big drops from his forehead with the skirt of his gown.

“You tripped up the stairs like a gazelle, padre,” said the girl, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and disposed the folds of her veil with all the tact of coquetry.

A thick snort, like the ejaculation a hippopotamus might have uttered, was the only reply, and Jekyl, having given a glance over the table to see all was in order, made a sign for Nina to be seated.

“Accursed be the stairs and he that made them!” muttered the padre. “I feel as if my limbs had been torn on the rack. I have been three times up the steps of the high altar already to-day, and am tired as a dog.” [Chapter XXIII, "A Small Supper Party," pp. 177-178]

Commentary

Phiz achieves the desired comedic effect by contrasting the clothing and poses of the principals: the exhausted, overweight "padre" from the Cathedral; the elegantly dressed host, Jekyl, gesturing towards the supper laid on the small table; the wasp-waisted Nina, got up as a Spanish flamenco dancer; and the discrete waiter from a nearby restaurant whose gesture and pose suggest that he feels somewhat uncomfortable already, even though the conversation has yet to turn to a critique of Florence's upper classes. The highly detailed illustration features those wonderful realia of Phiz's most engaging interior scenes: statuettes, vases, paintings, curtains, and an ornate screen, all which serve to emphasize the superficiality of the ensuing dialogue.

In order to better focus on the four characters, Phiz has had to leave out many of the details that Lever provides about the reception room and Jekyl's midnight repast in Florence's Mazzarini Palace. Phiz has Jekyl gesture, but no soup tureen is in evidence; the third chair must be to right; we see no lobster, no champagne in an ice-pail, no dumb-waiter, no moss-roses and camelias, and no fireplace.

Bibliography

Brown, John Buchanan. Phiz! Illustrator of Dickens' World. New York: Charles Scribner's, 1978.

Downey, Edmund. Charles Lever: His Life in Letters. 2 vols. London: William Blackwood, 1906.

Fitzpatrick, W. J. The Life of Charles Lever. London: Downey, 1901.

Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.

Lever, Charles. The Daltons, or, Three Roads in Life. Illustrated by "Phiz" (Hablot Knight Browne). London: Chapman and Hall, 1852, rpt. 1872.

Lever, Charles James. The Daltons, or, Three Roads in Life. http://www.gutenberg.org//files/32061/32061-h/32061-h.htm

Skinner, Anne Maria. Charles Lever and Ireland. University of Liverpool. PhD dissertation. May 2019.

Stevenson, Lionel. Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. New York: Russell & Russell, 1939, rpt. 1969.

_______. "The Domestic Scene." The English Novel: A Panorama. Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin and Riverside, 1960.

---

Victorian
Web

Illustra-
tion

Phiz

The
Daltons

Next

Last modified 26 April 2022